OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Information Diffusion in Social Networks in Two Phases
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

The problem of maximizing information diffusion, given a certain budget expressed in terms of the number of seed nodes, is an important topic in social networks research. Existing literature focuses on single phase diffusion where all seed nodes are selected at the beginning of diffusion and all the selected nodes are activated simultaneously. This paper undertakes a detailed investigation of the effect of selecting and activating seed nodes in multiple phases. Specifically, we study diffusion in two phases assuming the well-studied independent cascade model. First, we formulate an objective function for two-phase diffusion, investigate its properties, and propose efficient algorithms for finding seed nodes in the two phases. Next, we study two associated problems: (1) budget splitting which seeks to optimally split the total budget between the two phases and (2) scheduling which seeks to determine an optimal delay after which to commence the second phase. Our main conclusions include: (a) under strict temporal constraints, use single phase diffusion, (b) under moderate temporal constraints, use two-phase diffusion with a short delay while allocating most of the budget to the first phase, and (c) when there are no temporal constraints, use two-phase diffusion with a long delay while allocating roughly one-third of the budget to the first phase.
Optimizing the Performance of Reactive Molecular Dynamics Simulations for Multi-Core Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

Reactive molecular dynamics simulations are computationally demanding. Reaching spatial and temporal scales where interesting scientific phenomena can be observed requires efficient and scalable implementations on modern hardware. In this paper, we focus on optimizing the performance of the widely used LAMMPS/ReaxC package for multi-core architectures. As hybrid parallelism allows better leverage of the increasing on-node parallelism, we adopt thread parallelism in the construction of bonded and nonbonded lists, and in the computation of complex ReaxFF interactions. To mitigate the I/O overheads due to large volumes of trajectory data produced and to save users the burden of post-processing, we also develop a novel in-situ tool for molecular species analysis. We analyze the performance of the resulting ReaxC-OMP package on Mira, an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. For PETN systems of sizes ranging from 32 thousand to 16.6 million particles, we observe speedups in the range of 1.5-4.5x. We observe sustained performance improvements for up to 262,144 cores (1,048,576 processes) of Mira and a weak scaling efficiency of 91.5% in large simulations containing 16.6 million particles. The in-situ molecular species analysis tool incurs only insignificant overheads across various system sizes and run configurations.
Deep Speaker Verification: Do We Need End to End?
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

End-to-end learning treats the entire system as a whole adaptable black box, which, if sufficient data are available, may learn a system that works very well for the target task. This principle has recently been applied to several prototype research on speaker verification (SV), where the feature learning and classifier are learned together with an objective function that is consistent with the evaluation metric. An opposite approach to end-to-end is feature learning, which firstly trains a feature learning model, and then constructs a back-end classifier separately to perform SV. Recently, both approaches achieved significant performance gains on SV, mainly attributed to the smart utilization of deep neural networks. However, the two approaches have not been carefully compared, and their respective advantages have not been well discussed. In this paper, we compare the end-to-end and feature learning approaches on a text-independent SV task. Our experiments on a dataset sampled from the Fisher database and involving 5,000 speakers demonstrated that the feature learning approach outperformed the end-to-end approach. This is a strong support for the feature learning approach, at least with data and computation resources similar to ours.
Cross-lingual Speaker Verification with Deep Feature Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

Existing speaker verification (SV) systems often suffer from performance degradation if there is any language mismatch between model training, speaker enrollment, and test. A major cause of this degradation is that most existing SV methods rely on a probabilistic model to infer the speaker factor, so any significant change on the distribution of the speech signal will impact the inference. Recently, we proposed a deep learning model that can learn how to extract the speaker factor by a deep neural network (DNN). By this feature learning, an SV system can be constructed with a very simple back-end model. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of the feature-based SV system in situations with language mismatch. Our experiments were conducted on a complex cross-lingual scenario, where the model training was in English, and the enrollment and test were in Chinese or Uyghur. The experiments demonstrated that the feature-based system outperformed the i-vector system with a large margin, particularly with language mismatch between enrollment and test.
Fundamental Matrix Estimation: A Study of Error Criteria
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

The fundamental matrix (FM) describes the geometric relations that exist between two images of the same scene. Different error criteria are used for estimating FMs from an input set of correspondences. In this paper, the accuracy and efficiency aspects of the different error criteria were studied. We mathematically and experimentally proved that the most popular error criterion, the symmetric epipolar distance, is biased. It was also shown that despite the similarity between the algebraic expressions of the symmetric epipolar distance and Sampson distance, they have different accuracy properties. In addition, a new error criterion, Kanatani distance, was proposed and was proved to be the most effective for use during the outlier removal phase from accuracy and efficiency perspectives. To thoroughly test the accuracy of the different error criteria, we proposed a randomized algorithm for Reprojection Error-based Correspondence Generation (RE-CG). As input, RE-CG takes an FM and a desired reprojection error value $d$. As output, RE-CG generates a random correspondence having that error value. Mathematical analysis of this algorithm revealed that the success probability for any given trial is 1 - (2/3)^2 at best and is 1 - (6/7)^2 at worst while experiments demonstrated that the algorithm often succeeds after only one trial.
Seasonality in Dynamic Stochastic Block Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

Sociotechnological and geospatial processes exhibit time varying structure that make insight discovery challenging. This paper proposes a new statistical model for such systems, modeled as dynamic networks, to address this challenge. It assumes that vertices fall into one of k types and that the probability of edge formation at a particular time depends on the types of the incident nodes and the current time. The time dependencies are driven by unique seasonal processes, which many systems exhibit (e.g., predictable spikes in geospatial or web traffic each day). The paper defines the model as a generative process and an inference procedure to recover the seasonal processes from data when they are unknown. Evaluation with synthetic dynamic networks show the recovery of the latent seasonal processes that drive its formation.
Reservoir Computing on the Hypersphere
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Reservoir Computing (RC) refers to a Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) framework, frequently used for sequence learning and time series prediction. The RC system consists of a random fixed-weight RNN (the input-hidden reservoir layer) and a classifier (the hidden-output readout layer). Here we focus on the sequence learning problem, and we explore a different approach to RC. More specifically, we remove the non-linear neural activation function, and we consider an orthogonal reservoir acting on normalized states on the unit hypersphere. Surprisingly, our numerical results show that the system's memory capacity exceeds the dimensionality of the reservoir, which is the upper bound for the typical RC approach based on Echo State Networks (ESNs). We also show how the proposed system can be applied to symmetric cryptography problems, and we include a numerical implementation.
Justifications in Constraint Handling Rules for Logical Retraction in Dynamic Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

We present a straightforward source-to-source transformation that introduces justifications for user-defined constraints into the CHR programming language. Then a scheme of two rules suffices to allow for logical retraction (deletion, removal) of constraints during computation. Without the need to recompute from scratch, these rules remove not only the constraint but also undo all consequences of the rule applications that involved the constraint. We prove a confluence result concerning the rule scheme and show its correctness. When algorithms are written in CHR, constraints represent both data and operations. CHR is already incremental by nature, i.e. constraints can be added at runtime. Logical retraction adds decrementality. Hence any algorithm written in CHR with justifications will become fully dynamic. Operations can be undone and data can be removed at any point in the computation without compromising the correctness of the result. We present two classical examples of dynamic algorithms, written in our prototype implementation of CHR with justifications that is available online: maintaining the minimum of a changing set of numbers and shortest paths in a graph whose edges change.
Local Refinement Typing
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2017
Year: 2017

We introduce the Fusion algorithm for local refinement type inference, yielding a new SMT-based method for verifying programs with polymorphic data types and higher-order functions. Fusion is concise as the programmer need only write signatures for (externally exported) top-level functions and places with cyclic (recursive) dependencies, after which Fusion can predictably synthesize the most precise refinement types for all intermediate terms (expressible in the decidable refinement logic), thereby checking the program without false alarms. We have implemented Fusion and evaluated it on the benchmarks from the LiquidHaskell suite totalling about 12KLOC. Fusion checks an existing safety benchmark suite using about half as many templates as previously required and nearly 2x faster. In a new set of theorem proving benchmarks Fusion is both 10 - 50x faster and, by synthesizing the most precise types, avoids false alarms to make verification possible.
Online Power Control for Block i.i.d. Energy Harvesting Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

We study the problem of online power control for energy harvesting communication nodes with random energy arrivals and a finite battery. We assume a block i.i.d. stochastic model for the energy arrivals, in which the energy arrivals are constant for a fixed duration $T$, but are independent across different blocks, drawn from an arbitrary distribution. This model serves as a simple approximation to a random process with coherence time $T$. We propose a simple online power control policy, and prove that its performance gap to the optimal throughput is bounded by a constant which is independent of the parameters of the problem. This also yields a simple formula for the approximately optimal long-term average throughput, which sheds some light on the qualitative behavior of the throughput and how it depends on the coherence time of the energy arrival process. Our results show that, perhaps counter-intuitively, for a fixed mean energy arrival rate the throughput decreases with increasing coherence time $T$ of the energy arrival process. In particular, the battery size needed to approach the AWGN capacity of the channel increases linearly with the coherence time of the process. Finally, we show that our results can provide an approximation to the information-theoretic capacity of the same channel.
Cloud Storage Forensics: Analysis of Data Remnants on SpiderOak, JustCloud, and pCloud
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

STorage as a Service (STaaS) cloud platforms benefits such as getting access to data anywhere, anytime, on a wide range of devices made them very popular among businesses and individuals. As such forensics investigators are increasingly facing cases that involve investigation of STaaS platforms. Therefore, it is essential for cyber investigators to know how to collect, preserve, and analyse evidences of these platforms. In this paper, we describe investigation of three STaaS platforms namely SpiderOak, JustCloud, and pCloud on Windows 8.1 and iOS 8.1.1 devices. Moreover, possible changes on uploaded and downloaded files metadata on these platforms would be tracked and their forensics value would be investigated.
Honeypots for employee information security awareness and education training: A conceptual EASY training model
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

The increasing pervasiveness of internet-connected systems means that such systems will continue to be exploited for criminal purposes by cybercriminals (including malicious insiders such as employees and vendors). The importance of protecting corporate system and intellectual property, and the escalating complexities of the online environment underscore the need for ongoing information security awareness and education training and the promotion of a culture of security among employees. Two honeypots were deployed at a private university based in Singapore. Findings from the analysis of the honeypot data are presented in this paper. This paper then examines how analysis of honeypot data can be used in employee information security awareness and education training. Adapting the Routine Activity Theory, a criminology theory widely used in the study of cybercrime, this paper proposes a conceptual Engaging Stakeholders, Acceptable Behavior, Simple Teaching method, Yardstick (EASY) training model, and explains how the model can be used to design employee information security awareness and education training. Future research directions are also outlined in this paper.
Forensic Investigation of Social Media and Instant Messaging Services in Firefox OS: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Telegram, OpenWapp and Line as Case Studies
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Mobile devices are increasingly utilized to access social media and instant messaging services, which allow users to communicate with others easily and quickly. However, the misuse of social media and instant messaging services facilitated conducting different cybercrimes such as cyber stalking, cyber bullying, slander spreading and sexual harassment. Therefore, mobile devices are an important evidentiary piece in digital investigation. In this chapter, we report the results of our investigation and analysis of social media and instant messaging services in Firefox OS. We examined three social media services (Facebook, Twitter and Google+) as well as three instant messaging services (Telegram, OpenWapp and Line). Our analysis may pave the way for future forensic investigators to trace and examine residual remnants of forensics value in FireFox OS.
One random jump and one permutation: sufficient conditions to chaotic, statistically faultless, and large throughput PRNG for FPGA
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Sub-categories of mathematical topology, like the mathematical theory of chaos, offer interesting applications devoted to information security. In this research work, we have introduced a new chaos-based pseudorandom number generator implemented in FPGA, which is mainly based on the deletion of a Hamilton cycle within the $n$-cube (or on the vectorial negation), plus one single permutation. By doing so, we produce a kind of post-treatment on hardware pseudorandom generators, but the obtained generator has usually a better statistical profile than its input, while running at a similar speed. We tested 6 combinations of Boolean functions and strategies that all achieve to pass the most stringent TestU01 battery of tests. This generation can reach a throughput/latency ratio equal to 6.7 Gbps, being thus the second fastest FPGA generator that can pass TestU01.
Robust Video-Based Eye Tracking Using Recursive Estimation of Pupil Characteristics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Video-based eye tracking is a valuable technique in various research fields. Numerous open-source eye tracking algorithms have been developed in recent years, primarily designed for general application with many different camera types. These algorithms do not, however, capitalize on the high frame rate of eye tracking cameras often employed in psychophysical studies. We present a pupil detection method that utilizes this high-speed property to obtain reliable predictions through recursive estimation about certain pupil characteristics in successive camera frames. These predictions are subsequently used to carry out novel image segmentation and classification routines to improve pupil detection performance. Based on results from hand-labelled eye images, our approach was found to have a greater detection rate, accuracy and speed compared to other recently published open-source pupil detection algorithms. The program's source code, together with a graphical user interface, can be downloaded at https://github.com/tbrouns/eyestalker
Metrics for Bengali Text Entry Research
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2017
Year: 2017

With the intention of bringing uniformity to Bengali text entry research, here we present a new approach for calculating the most popular English text entry evaluation metrics for Bengali. To demonstrate our approach, we conducted a user study where we evaluated four popular Bengali text entry techniques.
NOMA in 5G Systems: Exciting Possibilities for Enhancing Spectral Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This article provides an overview of power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access for 5G systems. The basic concepts and benefits are briefly presented, along with current solutions and standardization activities. In addition, limitations and research challenges are discussed.
Between Homomorphic Signal Processing and Deep Neural Networks: Constructing Deep Algorithms for Polyphonic Music Transcription
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

This paper presents a new approach in understanding how deep neural networks (DNNs) work by applying homomorphic signal processing techniques. Focusing on the task of multi-pitch estimation (MPE), this paper demonstrates the equivalence relation between a generalized cepstrum and a DNN in terms of their structures and functionality. Such an equivalence relation, together with pitch perception theories and the recently established rectified-correlations-on-a-sphere (RECOS) filter analysis, provide an alternative way in explaining the role of the nonlinear activation function and the multi-layer structure, both of which exist in a cepstrum and a DNN. To validate the efficacy of this new approach, a new feature designed in the same fashion is proposed for pitch salience function. The new feature outperforms the one-layer spectrum in the MPE task and, as predicted, it addresses the issue of the missing fundamental effect and also achieves better robustness to noise.
Relational Algebra for In-Database Process Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2017
Year: 2017

The execution logs that are used for process mining in practice are often obtained by querying an operational database and storing the result in a flat file. Consequently, the data processing power of the database system cannot be used anymore for this information, leading to constrained flexibility in the definition of mining patterns and limited execution performance in mining large logs. Enabling process mining directly on a database - instead of via intermediate storage in a flat file - therefore provides additional flexibility and efficiency. To help facilitate this ideal of in-database process mining, this paper formally defines a database operator that extracts the 'directly follows' relation from an operational database. This operator can both be used to do in-database process mining and to flexibly evaluate process mining related queries, such as: "which employee most frequently changes the 'amount' attribute of a case from one task to the next". We define the operator using the well-known relational algebra that forms the formal underpinning of relational databases. We formally prove equivalence properties of the operator that are useful for query optimization and present time-complexity properties of the operator. By doing so this paper formally defines the necessary relational algebraic elements of a 'directly follows' operator, which are required for implementation of such an operator in a DBMS.
Degenerations of NURBS curves while all of weights approaching infinity
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2017
Year: 2017

NURBS curve is widely used in Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Geometric Design. When a single weight approaches infinity, the limit of a NURBS curve tends to the corresponding control point. In this paper, a kind of control structure of a NURBS curve, called regular control curve, is defined. We prove that the limit of the NURBS curve is exactly its regular control curve when all of weights approach infinity, where each weight is multiplied by a certain one-parameter function tending to infinity, different for each control point. Moreover, some representative examples are presented to show this property and indicate its application for shape deformation.
Multilevel Monte Carlo Method for Statistical Model Checking of Hybrid Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

We study statistical model checking of continuous-time stochastic hybrid systems. The challenge in applying statistical model checking to these systems is that one cannot simulate such systems exactly. We employ the multilevel Monte Carlo method (MLMC) and work on a sequence of discrete-time stochastic processes whose executions approximate and converge weakly to that of the original continuous-time stochastic hybrid system with respect to satisfaction of the property of interest. With focus on bounded-horizon reachability, we recast the model checking problem as the computation of the distribution of the exit time, which is in turn formulated as the expectation of an indicator function. This latter computation involves estimating discontinuous functionals, which reduces the bound on the convergence rate of the Monte Carlo algorithm. We propose a smoothing step with tunable precision and formally quantify the error of the MLMC approach in the mean-square sense, which is composed of smoothing error, bias, and variance. We formulate a general adaptive algorithm which balances these error terms. Finally, we describe an application of our technique to verify a model of thermostatically controlled loads.
Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access combined with Random Linear Network Coded Cooperation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This letter considers two groups of source nodes. Each group transmits packets to its own designated destination node over single-hop links and via a cluster of relay nodes shared by both groups. In an effort to boost reliability without sacrificing throughput, a scheme is proposed, whereby packets at the relay nodes are combined using two methods; packets delivered by different groups are mixed using non-orthogonal multiple access principles, while packets originating from the same group are mixed using random linear network coding. An analytical framework that characterizes the performance of the proposed scheme is developed, compared to simulation results and benchmarked against a counterpart scheme that is based on orthogonal multiple access.